About
Anna Chiaretta Lavatelli is an artist-filmmaker who uses moving images and writing to play with perception, authority, and agency. Through isolated gestures on screen, she undermines power structures implicit in the performance of femininity and image production itself. In her installations and video work, Lavatelli engages the gaze, repetition, and the absurd to unravel the connections between seeing and knowing. Currently she is working with material from personal histories that are intertwined with the making of our end times.
Lavatelli holds a Master of Fine Arts in Visual Arts from the University of California San Diego, and a Bachelor's degree in Media Study from the University at Buffalo. She teaches video production at the University at Buffalo, produces short documentaries and consults on digital media for museums, artists, and exhibitions. A collaborator by nature, she is a self-identified anarchist, and has a loud laugh.
Artist Statement
I am an artist-filmmaker using moving images and writing to play with perception, power, and performativity. The foundation of my visual research is in the codified pictures of the feminine ideal as expressed on screen in popular culture. I undermine the psychological dynamics of control in established modes of viewing by deploying the gaze, repetition, and the absurd. My installations and video works are realized in an array of forms: a field of eyes looking out from the structure of their projected surface (Untitled (Eyes)), a body slowly navigating a pink room echoing scenes of teenage boredom or actions slipping back and forth through time until interrupted by the subjects’ moment of eye contact (The Pink Room). Isolated gestures on screen are contained within constructed scenes designed around the frame. The image is destabilized through tensions built between movement and stillness, as well as representation and abstraction. These scenarios underscore the power structures implicit in the performance of femininity and image production itself. These pieces are also experiments in untethering time, a patriarchal capitalist conceit that we all live by and that video and film naturally reimagine. I complicate the transcendent untethering of the self through identification or consumption of moving images with the grounding of the viewer’s consciousness in the bodily and present reality.
The work unravels the connections between seeing and knowing. This conversation expands beyond bodies trapped in a frame to the trap of our collective imagined dystopia. My current project builds on material from personal histories intertwined with the making of our end times. Our capacity for imagination and time itself are pondered through the events that shaped my two grandfathers’ careers, the products of which formulated our capacity to monitor and destroy life. At present, I am digitally processing films captured by my grandfather in the 1950s on the Distant Early Warning Line (DEWLine), transforming them into minimalist compositions that transcend the representational, becoming a field of marks, a mere echo of repeated edges. A decade prior my paternal grandfather worked on the Manhattan Project as a young physicist, a project of science that founded the ultimate capacity for designing our end. These personal and male-dominated histories provide an avenue for diving into the borders of our confidence in warnings, preparedness, and perceived control over our destiny in spite of the unknown future—one which I examine with a decidedly feminist touch.